Indeed, the instrumentality of "landscape" is one of the things that Kinsella constantly draws our attention to. This does not mean to say that Kinsella himself resorts to any straightforward didacticism (although there are elements of this in some poems–'The Benefaction: Vicissitudes on interior,' for example21), but rather that didacticism itself is inherent to the very idea of landscape, just as are ideas of manufacture and process. It is not a question of whether or not nature is exclusive of such ideas, by any sort of definition, but whether it is not in fact "indifferent" to them. This is a moot point for Kinsella, since to give the word "indifferent" its more common psychological inflection would also reveal a possible return to what Ruskin labelled the pathetic fallacy. At the very least, the subjectification of nature will have served to reflect moral philosophy's ideas back at itself (if one wishes to subjectify philsophy in the same way), revealing, if it reveals anything, the essential solipsism of such didactics.
In 'Warhol at Wheatlands,' an effect of didacticism is constructed through the juxtaposition indicated in the title–one which operates on a more or less parodic level, as the juxtaposition itself can hardly be considered as either literal or plausible. It would be easy to imagine here that Kinsella is proposing landscape as being more substantive, more "real," than the Warholian persona, and using it as an indictment of the so-called post-modern condition. What is actually at stake, however, would seem to be less a claim upon the "real" than upon the unassimilable (both thematically and rhetorically). The unassimilable in this case would be the mark, precisely, of what is "missed"–and what is missed is presented not as the "real," in any straightforward sense of that word, but as an "other," even if this "other" manifests itself as nothing more than an "unfamiliar" system of signs, such as that presented by the Australian landscape (keeping in mind also that the analogical, or metaphorical, structure on which this poem is based, and which is signalled in the title itself, depends firstly upon an illusion of masking what is unassimilable in the encounter of necessarily unlike elements, as is also the case with the didactic text).
In many ways Kinsella can be seen as reciting the (post-) colonial antagonisms that have often been taken as defining moments of an Australian cultural sensibility as one of alienation, and this alienation is made more acute (and more ironic) by clichéd depictions of cross-cultural alarm and mystification. On the one hand, Warhol represents the intrusion of "alien" cultural and commercial interests (with an eye to asset stripping), while on the other (as a type of visitor from outer-space) he orientates a comedy of commodity fetishism, which is as much a burlesque of (one-sided) cultural exchange as it is of culture shock.
On an allegorical level, 'Warhol at Wheatlands' also re-enacts the larger history of Western encounters with the Australian landscape, which consistently found it to be aberrant, repellent, dystopic; the underside of the world, the Antipodes.22 That is to say, traumatic (a missed encounter with the "real" as much as with what Slavoj _i_ek has called "the sublime object of ideology"). In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes argues that, at the time of first settlement, Australia (and the Pacific basin, an "oceanic hell") functioned as a type of "geographical unconscious."23 The name of this dark continent at the time of "discovery" was Terra Australis Incognita: the name of the land-without-a-name, and perhaps something in this paradox presaged the sense of the unnamable that belongs to the "unconscious" which Freud discovered, at about the same time as "Australia" was coming into being as a federated, self- governing nation state (that is, when it might be said to have begun evolving its own consciousness, if not its own conscience).
Like Freud's unconscious, Australia existed in the European imagination initially as a series of "well-made enigmas / propitiatory hermeneutic and well coded" (Syzygy 11. 'Deletions')–the negative desire of an emergent scientific positivism. This "imagined country," as Hughes says, lurked beneath the rational conscious of the Enlightenment like something "infernal, its landscape that of Hell itself":
Within its inscrutable otherness, every fantasy could be contained; it was the geographical unconscious. So there was a deep, ironic resonance in the way the British, having brought the Pacific at last to the realm of European consciousness, having explored and mapped it, promptly demonized Australia once more by chaining their criminals on its innocent dry coast. It was to become the continent of sin.24
But as Hughes' comments imply, this Hell was already an operation of the rationalist spirit; it was what Foucault might have called a Hell of "discipline and punishment," a "corrective" Hell in the allegorical form of both Garten der Lüste and paysage moralisé. And in fact, in 1788, the colony of "New South Wales" was inaugurated as the largest scale prison facility in human history, and it at once become the epitome of the Sisyphean contract between labour and redemption enshrined in the Protestant work ethic of those who had instituted it.25
The flagrant nihilism of the penal colony extended also, to varying degrees of absurdity, to the project of continental exploration commencing in the 1820s, which most famously exhausted itself traversing one desert after another in search of a mythical ("redemptive") inland sea.26 In every endeavour, Australia seemed to resist assimilation to the European "idea," although this in itself seems to have been determined a priori, programmed by the "idea" that condemned it as dystopic in the first place. And this assignation as dys-topia ties in to an entire complex history of repression that organises itself around the concept of "property."27
Australia, it should be remembered, was first and foremost the destination of those who were considered to have insulted the law of property, it was dispossessed of those who failed to recognise (or even comprehend) the law of property, while it itself was consistently hostile to the very purpose of property– just as it has always been hostile to an aesthetics of the "proper." In this way Australia was also viewed (and often continues to be viewed) as dys-functional: the missionary work of pastoral industry, for example, being constantly undermined by the irrationality and godlessness of the place, manifested in floods, bushfires, droughts, and a native population seemingly immune to the inducements of salvation through toil. These demographic and environmental "disasters" give the appearance of a nihilistic force bent on sabotaging the efficient, serial production of pastoral industry, and this suggests another way of looking at the relationship between land-scape and technology in Kinsella's reading of Warhol.
Central to any discussion of Warhol is the notion of "authenticity," and the corresponding idea of art as being fundamentally distinct from manufacture, or of aesthetic value as being somehow intrinsic to a work of art (and therefore "real") and not determined by the marketplace (that is, as something purely nominal or virtual, and dependent upon a context). It is possible, for instance, to see the juxtaposition of Warhol with "Wheatlands" as a comment on the structure of authority in determining the signifying value of (the) landscape, particularly in regards to agricultural industry–in that the mechanisation of the land determines its meaning in terms of use-value, which in turn situates its meaning within a particular cultural-historical setting. In the experimental poetic sequence, Syzygy, Kinsella likens this to the technology of writing:
threatening construction on its very
printed page, corrector fluid
[...]
formatted like a river ending
in a window mouse decoratinggraphic disasters
without compassion. We impose.
Macrographic-Beta-Language[7. 'Subjecting objects to serious scrutiny']
In many ways, Syzygy can be said to explore this conjunction between poetics and technology,28 or between landscape and language, and there are notable instances where Kinsella deploys the figure of Warhol to negotiate these conjunctions.
Like Warhol, Kinsella can be seen to focus upon ways in which the heavily mediated, and mechanised "object" nevertheless resists "interpretation." In the case of the Australian landscape, and the Western Australian landscape in particular, this situation is radicalised; not only do the idiosyncratic aspects of the land escape mechanical normalisation (weather patterns, distance, population density, cultural isolation, racial difference, etc.), but they also call for normalisation–that is, from the point of view of an ideology which requires that the earth and its species be dignified or "redeemed" through utility in the service of advancing "civilisation" and sustaining economic "progress." Further, there is a level of contiguity between this ideology and the dominant aesthetic. For instance, there is the question of how land is represented (in the visual arts, in politics, in economics, in poetry: i.e. "the pastoral tradition"), and how in Australia this process has been, since colonisation, one of conflict between a mechanical "translation" of land into "land-scape" and a resistance to translation (an element of the unassimilable which enacts a deconstruction of the Western aesthetic, and so on). As Kinsella suggests (drawing upon the internal contradictions of "property"), this process may be "re-flex-ive / though who owns the fragments (?)" (Syzygy 18. 'peine fort et dure').29
One of the outcomes of the encounter between Kinsella and Warhol is the foregrounding of a certain irony regarding the meaning of "technique" and what authorises technique and determines it as a mechanism of identity. This irony, however, masks a radical violence: the systematic effort, in Australia, to not only translate, but to expunge (as a form of ge(n)ocide)–to replace the (dystopic) land with a functional (aestheticised) landscape, and thus to impose upon it a metaphysical "essence." In this way the nature-culture distinction breaks down, as does the opposition between essence and proprium (or outward aspect), and "landscape" henceforth functions as a type of deus ex machina–a grotesque and hysterical apparatus caught up in the perpetual manufacture of its own image as property.30
What would determine this in terms of traumatic realism is that this manufacture does not act to conceal what lies beyond, nor does it mask the absence of a beyond, a negation of place or a terra nullius. Rather it points to its own "technique," its own "essence" as technology, to what defines it as "technological." In section 2 of Syzygy, 'Fallout,' Kinsella writes:
remember looting these impressions? machinery expressive and light-
conscious love scarifying poise
the tractor rocketing the clod of loamy earth
bootlegging frustration mudbrick and fencewire
circular-saws threatening Robert Frosts
In this evocation of the encounter between pastoral and industry, Kinsella poses the question of how cultural self- awareness, through an aesthetics of representation, veils a threat posed by the technological, which is not only a threat of disillusionment originating somewhere "beyond" representation, but a threat which belongs to representation itself. In this way Kinsella poses the idea of landscape not only in terms of topos, but also as trope.
It is a commonplace that, for the most part, Australia inhabited the European Romantic imagination as the dystopia to North America's utopia. But while America had Southey, Coleridge and Blake to laud it as the next pantisocratic Jerusalem, Australia's spiritual patrons were more concerned with it's promise as a penal abyss into which a whole substrate of society might be cast and forgotten. Both were conceived in terms of "use," but the nature of this use differed radically in intention, even if it was similar in its outcomes.31